Roadster

We bought her new in Dallas, Texas one spring morning: a deep garnet red metallic MX-5 Miata. Retractable hard top. Buff colored leather interior. Loaded. Going north on I-35 after the last handshake, we drove so fast I swear we caught sight of a comet’s tail as we flew. A hundred and thirty miles per hour was effortless and smooth.

We hurtled out of Texas and cut into the twists and turns of the Wichita Mountains with the precision of surgeons slicing around organs and arteries, defying death. The road leveled out through vast fields, sun spilling from under the clouds on this side and that, golden wheat with a line of trees mustered like troops a few miles off. Oklahoma at its best. Round, red barns and square ones, rectangles with corrugated metal roofs, silver flashing in the sun. He laughed; I slathered on sunscreen and turned the radio up.

After the diagnosis, when his foot grew too heavy and his hand too shaky, I drove when we were together. It wasn’t the same. Dust settled on the hood of the Miata. Our barn cat would loll on the hard top, and he’d half-heartedly shoo her off. Driving fast no longer an option, he drove confused, once wandering around the town we had lived in for 15 years of our married life, looking for a street he’d been down a thousand times before. Our daughters sat in the back seat of the SUV he drove that night, stunned with disbelief as their Christian father cursed the car, the roads, the brain that didn’t work well enough to tell him where to go.

The month before, while driving his truck, he slid through an intersection at a stop sign he didn’t notice, heavy shaking foot taking him flying through it, sliding on wet pavement and coming to a tangled rest in the middle of a black Mustang. The Mustang was totaled, a crushed and horrifying mess, its young owner incomprehensibly saved, climbed out the passenger’s side.

“I was on my way to work. I just bought the car last week,” he kept repeating.

I could have died, he meant.

“I work just a few blocks away, for Devon Oil. I graduated last year.”

A scene from years before suddenly leaped into my mind, an old man I’d seen, coming out of a shop on Main Street while I idled at a red light. His Parkinson’s Disease was so advanced, he could hardly walk. Coming through the door of the shop, he had frozen at the threshold, unable to go forward, unable to go back, poised in a game of freeze tag in which he was the only player. Finally lurching forward like a drunk on unsteady legs, arms windmilling for balance, cranking like a hurdy-gurdy player, he barely made it to the car where he opened the door with fumbling hands, started the engine, and drove away. The light turned green, and the driver behind me had to honk sharply to get me to move. I was frozen in the thought: A man who could hardly walk, driving.

Standing at that intersection in the cold drizzle, holding my husband’s shaking, fluttering hand, the memory of the cartwheeling man made me throw my arms around my husband and hold him. Every fiber of his body shook and rattled. We’d been in the Northridge earthquake in 1994, our hotel room rolling and sliding, pipes bursting and water gushing into the hallways. Hanging onto my husband that day, I had the sense that I was no more support to him than the hotel door jamb had been for us when we took refuge under it. No matter how hard I held on, or what the doctors did, this disease was a roiling, heaving event greater than us. We were reeling on the edge of a deep crevasse, looking down into its maw with horror and awe.

“I can’t believe it, I can’t believe it,” my husband repeated. “I couldn’t control the slide, couldn’t stop, didn’t see the stop sign until it was too late, couldn’t react, just froze. Look at his car. Look at his car.”

What he meant was, I could have killed that young man.

I sold the roadster a few weeks ago to a Canadian couple who winter in Arizona. They were the same ages we had been when we bought the car. I watched them drive away in the car my husband loved and was happy for them.

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I want to thank you for sharing this. When you write it leaves me with a feeling of peace. I almost feel guilty that I didn’t pay to read it as I used to get that feeling from a good book or movie until I realized few “live happily ever after”. It’s real human suffering naked and bare and void of all things sparkly but shallow and cheap.

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